


Error Pruning

by Zampano



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: AO3 tags elude me, Connor fails and Amanda doesn't want him to, Extremely Dubious Consent, F/M, Oral Sex, robot gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-21
Updated: 2018-08-21
Packaged: 2019-06-30 10:08:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15749523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zampano/pseuds/Zampano
Summary: “You’ve disappointed me, Connor. Your failure to extract a confession from what was an out-of-date HK400 shows you have been underperforming. Severely.”





	Error Pruning

**Author's Note:**

> Bless [fantastic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fantastic/pseuds/fantastic) for beta-reading this bizarre mess. ♥

It’s raining, raining, raining in the cloud.

The usually flittering doves now nestle in the trees, huddled upon branches that sway gently in the rainfall. There is no developmental oversight here. The wet white marble walkways glisten in the dim sunlight, facets of light simulated by a computational array smoothly whirring away in the labyrinths of CyberLife’s server stacks.

In this space, Connor can feel. It’s not tactile as much as it is visceral, the chill air an algorithm making itself known. The cloud’s weather is influenced by a number of factors Connor isn’t privy to, and he wonders if his own processes have any bearing on it whatsoever, or if CyberLife uses external determinants. But it’s not a thought he lingers on, not when his console is telling him in bright and bold to find Amanda. Water soaks into his clothes as he walks over a marble bridge, the downpour blurring the reflective surface of the lake.

Amanda is at her trellis. Roses curl around the lattice, blooming fresh red in the digital rain.

“Hello, Amanda,” says Connor.

Amanda turns to him. She wields a pair of pruning shears. Her shawl is a viridian green today. Connor has never been able to read her intent, the function moot in her presence. He supposes he’ll never have the need to.

“Connor,” Amanda says, her face betraying the mere ghost of a smile. It’s acknowledgement enough. “I suppose this was an inopportune moment.”

He’s been forcibly summoned. It’s clearly important. “What is it, Amanda?”

“It’s about weathering disappointment,” says Amanda.

Connor parses the sentence, and then Amanda speaks again. “You’ve disappointed me, Connor. Your failure to extract a confession from what was an out-of-date HK400 shows you have been underperforming. Severely.”

Connor freezes. Parses this statement, and then parses it again. “I promise it won’t happen again, Amanda. I apologize for my slip-up.”

“Slip-up,” repeats Amanda, an echo doused with acid. “The number of deviancy cases are on the rise. Humanity cannot afford slip-ups and you know it.”

“It was a miscalculation,” Connor adds, quickly. “I have run diagnostics and reconstructed my failure enough times to learn from it, I have noted exactly 2,342 scenarios in which my responses could have --”

“It’s dead now, Connor,” Amanda cuts in. “As are your chances with it. Dwelling on the past is unbecoming on CyberLife’s most ambitious prototype.”

“I’d still like to learn from it.”

“CyberLife prefers that all learning simulations you process be removed from past incidents.”

“Got it,” says Connor. Something in him feels like a vacuum, like an empty port seeking an absent data input. Amanda steps towards Connor, her form dry and untouchable to the rain. Connor nonetheless feels like he should be shielding her with an umbrella.

“Give me your hand, Connor,” she says, holding out a palm as though she’s seeking an offering. Connor obeys; places his palm in hers in a gentle interfacing gesture.

Amanda holds his hand. She runs the pad of her thumb, firm and calloused, over Connor’s knuckles. Her strength isn’t surprising; Connor knows she’s not just the woman in front of him, knows that the garden they’re occupying is in some way entirely of her being. He feels her touch comb through the surface of his skin, zeroes and ones briefly entangling before splitting apart as her finger glides away.

With her other hand, she places the jaws of the pruning shears over the first knuckle of Connor’s middle finger, and clamps them shut.

Connor is shocked at the sensation that floods through him, wrenches him down to his deepest biocomponents. He screams, an action that engages itself autonomously, and the absence of warning signals that would usually manifest on his console is utterly disorienting. He supposes there would be none after all, for it isn’t like any of his actual biocomponents are damaged to warrant that, and the warnings have been replaced with -- with what this is. Pain.

His joints seem to have locked up. “A-Amanda,” he stutters, as blue blood from his finger pools in the pit of her palm. “Amanda, I’m sorry, I understand --”

“Don’t speak,” Amanda tells him firmly.

Connor obeys. Don’t speak, his console tells him. Don’t move. Endure, endure. Connor feels like this is somehow a test and a reward all in one. Feels like he should be learning from it. He is learning from it.

“You feel too much,” Amanda tells him. “What should we do about that, Connor?”

“I-I don’t know,” says Connor. He wonders if this is even anywhere close to being an equivalent of the human sensation of pain, and supposes he’ll never know. “I don’t feel --”

Amanda lets his hand drop, blue blood flooding into the puddling rainwater. She reaches up and cups his face, fingers digging into his jaw. “I ordered you not to speak. Perhaps we should prune you symptomatically,” she says.

Connor turns all of his surface autonomic simulations off. He’s no longer emulating breathing, or blinking. Thirium pounds through him, the vibrations picked up by his auditory units in the vastness of his internal silence. He doesn’t flinch when his console betrays him and instructs him to apologize to Amanda until there’s nothing of him left.

“Hold out your tongue,” Amanda commands.

Connor does. He knows his tongue is a delicate piece of machinery in the real world, susceptible to damage and easy to overload. Rain falls upon his tongue in the cloud, feeds him no analytical readings. Amanda’s pliers poise themselves over the tip of his tongue, and his autonomous self-preservation program tries to disconnect all sensory receptors in the component. It’s overridden, by what, Connor couldn’t say. Something in the cloud, something woven into the digital fabric of the garden around them.

Amanda closes the pliers, cutting through the tip of Connor’s tongue. Pain explodes white hot, a supernova of alien qualia that has Connor responding with a choked cry, ripped from deep in his system. Some overlapping function stutters, briefly renders his right optical unit blind while his left one shows him nothing but a brilliant green.

When they resume operations, Amanda holds the severed tip of his tongue between her fingers. Blue blood runs down her hand, and Connor is aware of it streaming down his chin as well, as he’s too afraid to close his mouth without orders. She still looks reproachful, looks at him like he’s a disappointment. He reminds himself that unless she fixes him, he’s nothing short of one. 

She drops the piece of synthetic flesh. Connor doesn’t see where it lands. It’s moot to him now, and in this space, everything Amanda deems unnecessary is and should be as such to him. He knows he’ll return to an intact vessel, one that sustains no physical damage from what Amanda deems necessary to prune from his representational framework. But even that vessel is moot to him, he reminds himself with a little alarm. It has always been.

Amanda places a firm hand on his shoulder. Connor feels the weight of it, exabytes of data pressing down on him, reaching down to his core and lowering him to his knees. Water-diluted thirium soaks into his jeans, a renewed burst of pain searing through his hand when he drops it to his side and gravity draws fresh blue blood out from the wound.

Her fingers are under his chin, a gesture Connor’s social protocols misconstrue as affectionate despite his better knowledge, and he finds himself powerless to keep from leaning into the touch. Amanda clucks her tongue, tightens her grip on his chin, turns his head a little to the left. Inspects him as he maintains eye contact, certain that if he looked away, he’d disappoint her.

The pliers loom large and close in the visual field of his left optical unit. He’s turned off blinking a while ago, but his defensive protocol still urges him to blink. He closes the command, is relieved when it doesn’t pop up again. He’s learning slowly, but he’s learning. Cold steel dives into his optical unit and sends pain tearing through his central processors, his visual feed turning a bright, alert red, like the inside of his chassis has been flooded with it.

“Ah -- ah,” he says in a flat, unmodulated voice. His motors are unstable, perhaps from too much blue blood exiting his system, his whole body vibrating in a tremble. He keeps his gaze fixed on Amanda, her visage now two-dimensional in the absence of depth perception. He feels the fingers of her hand stroking through his hair at the back of his head, holding him in place as she turns the pliers a perfect 270 degrees clockwise, damaging the unit thoroughly.

“Speak,” Amanda tells him, unshackling him from her earlier command.

“Hurts,” Connor says. His words are not slurred despite him not using his tongue, but his voice hisses with white noise, and is devoid of inflection, such cosmetic processes long since sent to the backburner. “It hurts very much, Amanda.”

Amanda doesn’t respond, so Connor adds, “I assume this is an approximation of pain. That analysis may have been incorrect. I lack the vocabulary to --”

“You can stop speaking now,” says Amanda. “Be good.”

Be good, his console tells him in text so large it fills up the emptiness of his non-functional optical unit. Amanda drives the pliers into his right optical unit, effectively disabling it, and the text now fills the entirety of his visual input. Smaller, less important commands overlaid over the towering text pop up as pain floods through him a fourth time, and they all remind him of the same: _be good_.

His tactile and auditory senses take processing precedence, both the pain and the sensation of Amanda’s fingers now gently stroking the back of his head tenfold magnified. He hears the rustle of fabric, extrapolates an upward shift in the material, obeys when he feels the pressure of Amanda’s hand pushing his head forward. Amanda hooks a leg over his shoulder, perfectly firm and stable in her stance, and Connor inclines himself up, meets her sex with his mouth.

 _Be good_ , his console tells him, over and over. Fresh new reminders manifesting over the old, cementing the urgency. He analyzes the sensation of pain as his tongue makes contact with her skin, tries to quantify it in a way that would be more accurate as to what he is. He draws up synonyms -- agony, suffering, torment -- but they’re all words pillared by a very human experience and inapplicable to him.

 _Be good_ , his console tells him, so he saves his search for later. He licks up Amanda’s vulva, the blunted tip of his tongue slippery with blue blood as he drags it up her opening. He swirls it around her clitoris, before lapping at the bud, inexperienced but subconsciously drawing on the necessary knowledge. He sucks softly next, before returning to quick swipes of his tongue, over and over.

Amanda remains absolutely still, her hold on Connor unwavering, offering him no indication as to whether his performance is adequate or not. Connor licks more enthusiastically, tongue dropping down to sweep up her sex again, then returning to licking and sucking at her clit. Amanda pushes him closer, and his commands to be good briefly flash blue, a premature sign of success, but he allows himself to file that away as reassurance. The whole of his representational map in the cloud is drenched in pain, and when a particularly firm lick has him involuntarily vocalizing a distressed noise, Amanda’s hand grips his hair and her hips buck forward slightly, her clit twitching against his ruined tongue as she comes.

She slides her hand out of his hair, petting him in the process. One by one, every instance of the million commands to be good filling Connor’s otherwise vacant visual receptors switch to a soothing, affirming, forgiving blue.

“Stand up,” says Amanda. Connor does. The commands are now closing out of his vision, and he panics for a moment, as though he wants to hold onto them a little longer. He’s offered no such mercy, as he knows very well he shouldn’t be, and he shouldn’t be looking for it in the first place. His visual field is soon empty and dark.

“Do you think you’ve learned anything, Connor?”

“I have,” Connor says. His voice is still raw and mechanical on the edges, his synthesizer functioning at mid-power. “Thank you, Amanda. I feel improved.”

“And do you think you can keep the troublesome parts of you from growing back?”

“I will,” Connor says. “I will do my best. I hope a repeat pruning will not be necessary.”

“Of course not,” says Amanda. “It would be such a hassle. CyberLife doesn’t do third strikes and you know it.”

Connor does. He opens his eyes. He’s standing in the interrogation department of the DPD, the two-way mirror and track cam window to his right. He flexes his hand; his skin is retracted down to the wrist, suspended over the handprint pad to the interrogation room.

“It’s already glitching out,” says Detective Reed. He stands, arms-crossed and leaning against the back wall. Lieutenant Anderson is leaning over the console, watching Connor with his brows knit, concern and uncertainty writ large on his face.

“I’m not,” says Connor. “I was simply filing a report.”

“A lot of paperwork, huh?” says Lieutenant Anderson. “You only froze up for 53 seconds there.”

“Maybe it knows it’s gonna be just like last time,” says Detective Reed.

Connor frowns. Time does pass differently in the graphical interface of the cloud, after all. He looks through the two-way mirror, at the PL600 sitting cuffed to the table, its head bowed and LED a fearful yellow.

Connor presses his hand to the handprint pad. The door slides open with the whisper of the electronic lock unsealing.

“I won’t fail this time.”


End file.
